Bill Straub: From calamity to farce, House speaker election highlights a GOP circus lead by the clowns

McCarthy, meanwhile, remains doggedly determined to capture the prize that he has somehow determined he is entitled to. Vote after vote he is told to take a hike. And vote after vote, like Sheldon Whiteside, he keeps sticking around.

In the words of Jagger and Richards, you can’t always get what you want. Some people just can’t take a hint.

McCarthy is no prize. He’s the gent who asserted that he would find it difficult to keep from pounding former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, with the Speaker’s gavel after she hands it to him. Stay classy, pal.

His mastery of the English language is, well, let’s just say it’s a work in progress. And he’s no Einstein. He may not even be a Beavis. He has no agenda other than to promise everything to everyone in a pitiful attempt to attain the position he covets.

In other words, Kevin McCarthy is the quintessential Republican leader. Just why the party’s Khmer Rouge wing finds him so distasteful is hard to decipher. McCarthy and the radicals are both so far to the right as to be on the very edge of lunacy. The only possible answer is his foes don’t believe McCarthy possesses the ability to rip the whole system down like the Walls of Jericho when the time arrives. They may be correct since it’s dubious whether McCarthy has the ability to achieve anything when the time arrives.

For what it’s worth, the entire Kentucky congressional delegation, with the exception of Morgan McGarvey, the newly-elected Democrat from the Third Congressional District around Louisville who, like everyone else, hasn’t even been sworn in yet because of the ongoing contretemps, has thrown its support behind McCarthy, drawing attention to the old saw that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

For the most part, the Commonwealth’s GOP delegation consists of get-along-to-go-along types who really don’t care who serves as Speaker as long as they can continue punching down on people who are different, thus attracting votes and, more importantly, campaign funds.

Two of them are even trying to convince folks that this ongoing vaudeville routine is somehow a good thing. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, firmly in the running for lawmaker in DC who is there to just fill a seat, told Jake Tapper on CNN, “…you can look at it from the perspective that Kevin McCarthy won the vote among Republicans, over 200 members to 20 six times. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a mathematician to figure out that’s a landslide victory within the Republican conference.”

Andy is fortunate, as he said, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to discern all this. He went on to note that McCarthy’s totals “are not enough to earn the speakership,” hinting that if it weren’t for those doggone Democrats getting a vote – Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, has outpolled McCarthy in each of the tallies – that McCarthy would be the man.

Then there’s our boy Rep. Jamie Comer, R-Whereverhehangshishatishishome, who also remains tied to McCarthy, probably to ensure he retains the promise allowing him to serve as chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where he intends to serve as a modern Tomas de Torquemada.

Comer insisted on MSNBC that the contested Speaker vote is “something long term, honestly, I think is going to be good for us.

“This is a display of democracy but it shows how hard it is to get to 218 and a lot of those guys have never served in a legislative body before. They’ve never been in a majority.”

If you say so. But in the past, it hasn’t been THAT hard. The last time a Speaker election went past the first ballot was 1923.

But the most interesting participant in this little game is our old friend Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, who, in the past, has earned a reputation for brazenly opposing Speakers from his own party, specifically former Rep. John Boehner, R-OH, and former Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI. This go-round he has consistently voted for McCarthy, surprising since his comrades in arms on the weirdo far right are solidly against the Californian.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Now Massie may find himself in the middle of the fracas. Tucker Carlson, the inveterate Fox News bigot who has made a career standing against all that is holy, has suggested a way for McCarthy to escape from the conundrum and achieve his speakership goal — create a commission to investigate the FBI and put Massie in charge.

Yes, you read that right.

Here’s what Carlson said in his Tuesday belch:

“…Kevin McCarthy could put Thomas Massie of Kentucky in charge of a new Frank Church committee designed to discover what the FBI and the intel agencies have been doing to control domestic politics in this country. They’ve been doing a lot, but no one in Washington wants to talk about it. This topic is effectively off-limits and has been. In fact, no one’s talked about it for almost 50 years.”

Gee, what a grand idea.

McCarthy reportedly has embraced the proposal – promising everything up to and including a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage to achieve his destiny. And Massie apparently wants in, telling Steven Nelson of The New York Post that he would “love” to chair such a panel.

Some background. The Church Committee, so named because it was chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-ID, was a Senate select committee formed in 1975 to investigate abuses within the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the IRS. It was created in response to reports that the CIA was engaged in domestic spying and various covert actions. It ultimately put the kibosh on some of the nation’s more outrageous operations, like foreign assassinations.

Radical right-wingers have recently seized the cudgel against the FBI, insisting that the once staid, conservative agency under the direction of Christopher A. Wray, a Republican, by the way, is overrun by Bolsheviks and needs to be straightened out.

Most of the right-wing revulsion with the FBI centers around – you guessed it – one Donald J. Trump, the former president who has been the subject of myriad investigations because, well, legal niceties have never been his stock in trade. Trump fired Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, because he refused to pledge his undying loyalty to the pumpkin-skinned ogre and failed to press charges against Trump’s Democratic foe in the 2016 presidential election, Hilary Clinton, over her email issues.

Then there was the subpoena served by the agency on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate where classified documents – which Trump was supposed to turn over upon his departure from the White House – were discovered in an unsecured storage area.

Comer, who has been chomping at the bit for his House Oversight and Reform Committee to plunder the FBI, maintaining that the agency “needs to be dismantled,” suggesting that the agency has sought to cover up the virtually non-existent HUNTER BIDEN! laptop controversy and other deeds he considers – gasp! – liberal. He sought to end all funding until Congress had the opportunity to investigate the FBI’s dealings with social media, including Twitter, a move that went down in flames.

So now, if McCarthy ultimately proves successful, and, yes, that’s a joke, the task could be handed over to Massie. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

Regardless, who needs Emmitt Kelly when we have the Republican members of the House of Representatives?

Ask Sondheim:

Don’t you love a farce?

My fault, I fear